Youth turnout up, decisive

One objection that's sometimes raised about youth voter pre-registration in Rhode Island's General Assembly is that young voters are apathetic, and they won't take advantage of pre-registration even if we implement it.

Since pre-registration would cost next to nothing, I've never understood what the point of this argument is. Especially since the data from Florida (where pre-registration was recently started) seem to show a significant increase in youth turnout due to pre-registration.

Young voters favored the winner of this election by more than a two-to-one margin, forming a major part of the winning coalition. Overall, voters chose Obama over McCain by a much narrower margin of about 52% to 46%. This gap in presidential choice by age is unprecedented. The average gap from 1976 through 2004 was only 1.8 percentage points, as young voters basically supported the same candidate as older voters in most elections.

Obama's dominance among young voters was yet another exception in his historic, rule-breaking run